Sunday, December 8, 2013

No Answers

Why we need first aid kits for physical and mental health

On the first Wednesday of December, I had big plans for my
children. There’s something about this past year—the stress, the anxiety, the
uncertainty—that has made me nostalgic for Christmas in a way I haven’t been
for a long time. I gave up on physical Christmas cards years ago, opting for
email ostensibly because I wanted to be green, but really because I was just
lazy. And even an artificial tree is usually too much work.

Wednesdays are important days for me. Since my blog about my
son with mental illness went viral in December 2012, four hours after school
and every other weekend have been my only times to be with my younger two
children. When you have to cram a whole week’s worth of love into four hours, every
minute, every second counts. And this first Wednesday in December, I wanted to
create perfect Christmas memories.

In hindsight, I should have listened to my daughter. She
wanted the smallest tree, but her brothers talked me into a bigger one, perhaps
too large for our two-bedroom town-home. We lashed the tree with twine
to the top of the car, and I made my way home with an excess of caution,
annoying the drivers behind me as the kids and I hollered out Christmas carols at twenty
miles per hour.

“Let’s saw off the end of the tree so it can hydrate,” I
told my 16-year old son when we got home. We hunted for the saw, an old dull
one, and he began to work in earnest on the trunk. It was knotty. I held the
tree firmly between my knees as he sawed. “Be careful,” I warned.

Too late. In one instant, the saw glanced off a knot, gauged
into his finger. He cried out and ran into the house to apply pressure while I
hauled out the first aid kit. As we wrapped his throbbing, bloody finger in
gauze, it was clear that we needed to get medical attention right away. My mind
raced—I thought of my son’s piano playing, his dream of becoming a surgeon. Could
one freak Christmas tree accident ruin everything?

“Come on, guys,” I called to the others. “Change of plans.”

We piled into the car and drove around the corner to the Doc
in a Box, where we are on a first name basis with the staff.

More than two hours (and nine stitches) later, it was time
to take the younger children back to their Dad’s house. No cookies, no fudge,
no cocoa. No decorating the tree, which lay forlornly on its side, shedding
needles all over the carpet.

“Mom,” my 14-year old son said when I got home. “I think it
would be a good idea if you did all the sawing from now on. It was really
inconvenient to have X cut his finger like that, right during our time with the
kiddos.”

(Thank you, son, for stating the obvious).

My son sliced his finger just a few days after the
Connecticut State Attorney released the report about what happened at Sandy
Hook Elementary School last year. And that report has been on my mind. The
verdict? No answers. Lots of legally purchased guns. And a young man with a
long history of mental illness.

"The obvious question that remains is: “Why did the shooter
murder twenty-seven people, including twenty children?” Unfortunately, that
question may never be answered conclusively, despite the collection of
extensive background information on the shooter through a multitude of interviews
and other sources…. It is known that the shooter had significant mental health
issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with
others, even those to whom he should have been close. As an adult he did not
recognize or help himself deal with those issues."

No answers. It’s the hardest thing about life, isn’t it? When
something bad, worse, or truly horrible happens, we want answers. We want accountability. Maybe we
even want revenge.

At the very least, we crave simple cause and effect. We want
fairness, and we want life to make sense.

But it doesn’t. It just doesn’t.

After my son cut his finger, my friends tried to make light
of it. “Anyone can have cookies and cocoa,” one joked. “How many people get
stitches for Christmas? That’s the way to make lasting memories!”

I'd still prefer the other, more conventional memories. For me, the accident was a reminder that sometimes bad
things happen, and those things are beyond our control. In fact, all too often,
all we can control is our reaction to the event. We can choose to hate. Or we can choose to
forgive.

What have we, as a society, done since Sandy Hook to help
people with “significant mental health issues,” people like Adam Lanza, Jared
Loughner, Seung Hui Cho, James Holmes, Aaron Alexis, Gus Deeds? In my essay
last year, I said that it was time to talk about mental illness, and it was.

It’s still time to talk. And it’s definitely past time to stop blaming the
mothers, a memo I’d like to send to Emily Miller, senior opinion editor of the Washington
Post, who apparently still thinks that’s the solution:

"In the end, we can’t blame lax gun-control
laws, access to mental health treatment, prescription drugs or video games for
Lanza’s terrible killing spree. We can point to a mother who should have been
more aware of how sick her son had become and forced treatment.”

But Adam Lanza was 20 years old. Even if his mother had
recognized that his insistence on communicating solely through email was a
little off, Nancy Lanza would have had a potentially uphill fight to force
treatment for her adult son, as Pete Earley and others have noted. The fact is that the whole system is broken, and tragedies like Newtown are inevitable until we start to make real changes in how we view and treat mental illness.

In a pointed call for action nearly one year after the Newtown
tragedy, Linda Rosenburg, CEO of the National Council for Behavioral Health, recommended a practical, real-world solution: Mental Health First Aid training for everyone, so that we all can recognize the
early signs and symptoms of mental illness and intervene before it’s too late.

“Mental Health First Aid makes it OK to
have the difficult conversations — it helps people open up and talk with
family, friends, and coworkers. It ends the isolation and offers a path out of
the despair,” Rosenburg wrote.

Mental health first aid might be just what we need. When my
son cut his finger, we grabbed the first aid kit. Then we called the doctor and got him the care that he needed. In a few
more days, he will play Christmas carols with a healthy finger.

It’s about time we had the same solutions for mental health.
Enough talk. It’s time to act.

2 comments:

Given that Nancy Lanza was fully aware that her son was very, very sick and working desperately hard to find some sort of treatment for him, it probably would have been a good idea to store her arsenal of legally obtained guns and ammo someplace else, i.e. not at home.

While Adam Lanza's massacre isn't entirely her fault, she definitely made it easier for him to kill people (see: arsenal of weapons) and indulged him when he was 18 or under and COULD have forced treatment -- or refused to let her son stay in her house once he ceased speaking to her. Allowing your precious little snowflake to boss you around via text message did no one, least of all him any favors.

Finally, the Lanza's were the RARE family that could EASILY have afforded to put Adam in treatment -- Nancy got $320K per year in alimony, her ex (Adam's dad) was an executive at a Fortune 500 company. She could EASILY have afforded the $6K per month.

I'm not going to second-guess Nancy Lanza. Like all of us, she made the best decisions she knew how to make, and paid personally when she was wrong.

In light of my own experience I am finding the assumption that if you only try hard enough (and, ideally, have lots of money) you can find a treatment for a mentally ill child. We could not, and the barrier was not financial. There is no bandaid for this, and sometimes no more fundamental treatment either.

All human societies have struggled with mental illness; none that I know of has found the answer.

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About Me

Liza Long, aka the Anarchist Soccer Mom, is a writer, educator, mental health advocate, and mother of four children. She loves her Steinway, her husband, her kids,and her day job, not necessarily in that order. Her book "The Price of Silence: A Mom's Perspective on Mental Illness" from Hudson Street Press is available in bookstores and online. The views expressed on this blog are entirely her own and in no way reflect the views of her employer (or anyone else, for that matter).